Hello! It is my displeasure to report that 4 years out, having COVID still sucks! Zero stars, do not recommend.

Fortunately, now that the brain fog has lifted, I can enjoy processing thoughts again beyond the realm of Next Level Chef. Here’s what’s new on the nightstand:

1. The nightstand! Have been using a random IKEA bookshelf as a nightstand for a couple years now, so this has been an exciting upgrade. Highly recommend a nightstand with drawers.

2. The Fraud Zadie Smith: This is next on my stack. I have just read the first few pages, but feel confident that, as a ZS completionist, it’s likely I’ll find something to love in here. Even in the little I’ve read it’s pleasurable to see Smith situated in another century.

3. Sex with a Brain Injury Annie Liontas: This hybrid work of nonfiction/memoir was one of my most-anticipated for the year, and it did not disappoint. It is at turns funny, heartbreaking, enraging, and sweet in its personal narrative, and I learned a LOT of things about brain injuries and brains in general. I really loved this one.

4. Beautyland Marie-Helene Bertino: When I was a kid, I used to go to Beautyland—a Philly (? or maybe they are everywhere?) beauty supply store with my grandma. I haven’t been inside one in decades, but if I close my eyes, I can still smell its industrial hairspray scent, and feel that wonder-revulsion combo that’s pitted my gut in the presence of femme things I am supposed to, but do not, understand. Anyway, this book isn’t about that, except insofar as it is so perfectly about feeling like a total weirdo. The aliens in Bertino’s novel are actual aliens, but that doesn’t make them any less relatable.

5. A Place in the Country W.G. Sebald: If you’ve read Girl at War, (or just talked to me for a while (lol)) you’ll know that I’m a Sebald fanboi. Something about his writing bends time for me in a way that I can neither articulate nor emulate well, the latter much to my younger self’s chagrin. This collection of essays is unsurprisingly stellar, but if you haven’t read Sebald before, I suggest starting with his novels Austerlitz or The Emigrants.

6. One Line a Day notebooks: I came to writing in large part through journaling, a way for a shy kid to express myself that never wavered even as I went deaf. Writing things down about my life remains an important way for me to process them, but now that I have all these jobs and children, it can be harder to cordon off time for journaling vs. other writing. Enter this awesome little notebook. My friend the talented Crystal Hana Kim turned me on to this brand in particular, which is set up so that you write one line a day across the book for a year, then return to the beginning for the next year, so all five years of the same day—say April 10th 2024-2029—will exist on one page.

   

   Since I’m just on my first year, I haven’t had the pleasure of being able to look back as I write my next line in, but I can imagine that it’s often funny and fascinating to see what one decided to save in years past. Anyway, I’m really loving this new practice so far; even when I’m super tired, I can eek out a line, and then I feel better about myself for having done it. PS—Pick up Crystal’s new novel The Stone Home; it’s really good!

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